The one guitarist Patti Smith called completely boring: “That wasn’t rock and roll”
Patti Smith was never interested in impressing anyone with her rock and roll prowess whenever she took to the stage.
She was on a mission to create music that could move people, and even if she didn’t have the best musical background or anything, she knew that she was put on this Earth to make the kinds of songs that broke down what rock and roll was supposed to be. Not everything needed to be too flashy, and a lot of her best songs were about taking the skeleton of rock and roll and building something new out of it.
Because when you look at the bands Smith looked up to, none of them were interested in making everything sound complicated. There was an artsy slant to everything that Lou Reed did, for instance, but even the least artsy listener could understand what ‘Heroin’ was about or grasp onto the seedy side of ‘Venus in Furs’. It wasn’t sugar-coated by any means, but that’s what Smith liked about it.
She wanted to make music that sounded as blunt as the poetry that she was making, and a lot of that came from her feeding off of what the music was doing to her. Listening to a Jimi Hendrix record could make her feel every single emotion imaginable, and even if people like Lenny Kaye didn’t know a ton about scales or classical chord progressions, he didn’t have to in order to give Smith the inspiration when performing ‘Gloria’.
It all had to do with the energy that everyone created together whenever they hit the stage, but that’s not exactly what the rest of the world was doing. Bear in mind that this was the same era that turned a band like Kiss into one of the biggest concert draws in the world, and while Gene Simmons seemed like a fire-breathing monster onstage, Smith could see through the corporate side of what Simmons was doing.
A lot of people were treating rock and roll like a business, but there were also some bands that didn’t seem to have a good reason to be one of the best in the world. Cream had already begun spewing out a billion different copycats, but whereas Eric Clapton took the blues to new heights that no one else could have imagined, Smith felt that someone like Robin Trower was far from the massive superstar that she was looking for whenever she went to a show.
Smith at least tried to understand what Trower was all about when seeing one of his solo shows, but even after working with Procol Harum, Smith felt that what he was doing onstage had nothing to do with the kind of music that she wanted to make, saying, “I just write from the heart, you know, I just write like how I feel. I don’t get on to some intellectual riff and, like, kaleidoscope it. Robin Trower: That wasn’t rock and roll. That was boredom.”
Trower was still definitely talented at what he did, but it’s easy to see what Smith didn’t understand about him. He was still out there trying to impress the audience with the different twists and turns that he could take with his music, but if you have someone who’s so focused on wowing the audience that they forget about the song, you start to have a major problem every time they get onstage.
Because while anyone can do the best stage banter that they can to create something that people will remember for a few days, Smith thrived on that human connection with the audience. She wanted to give every crowd music that would stick with them the rest of their lives, and she wasn’t going to rest until she made an epiphany go off in someone’s head whenever she performed her classics.
